Haven't gotten into Zig, but it's on my list. I'm trying to get into Go and Rust now. Especially since I too have almost 20 years of using Python under my belt and hit those annoying "sometimes I just want to be explicit" moments.

That being said I will always come back to Python especially because I do now understand those pitfalls that can totally stump someone who's new to the language. The general syntax and elegance of generator expressions is addictive for small projects and quick tools. No boilerplate and a few comprehensions can do the work of a whole library (albeit quite a bit slower, but pretty frequently runtime is secondary to maintenance time).

I do like that type hinting is becoming the standard in Python though. I have absolutely abused the private apis for reading type hints in my code to get a sorta poor man's runtime type validation in mission critical (database) fuctions. I've used type hints with a decorator to build API endpoints as well. Hope that someday Python finally just commits and stops pretending to be lazy Rust and just allows you to opt into static typing.